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During dinner, at which Moltke and Roon were present, the announcement arrived from the embassy in Paris that the Prince of Hohenzollern had renounced his candidature in order to prevent the war with which France threatened us.
In point of fact, as the revelations of more recent years have shown, Moltke was more anxious about the forces of Bourbaki than about those of Chanzy, and both Prince Frederick Charles and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg had instructions to keep a strict watch on the movements of Bourbaki's corps.
Its only occupants were a few scattered onlookers shivering in the cold, and the officials and employees whose duties required their presence. But on the Moltke, in spite of the chill air and the gray morning, all were animated and eager. The band played the "Belle of New York" while the ship was being warped into the stream, and the "American Patrol" while it was steaming down the river.
I remember I found him exactly my ideal of the Duke of Wellington; for though I was only then ten or twelve years of age, I had my own ideas about every soldier from Alexander and Von Moltke to our own Captain Custer.
At all events, he was prepared for it, as were the silent soldier, von Roon, and the gentle tactician, von Moltke. These gentlemen were away for a holiday, but they returned, and, as history tells, had merely to fill in a few dates on already prepared documents. If France was not ready she thought herself so, and was at all events willing.
The armies which in modern times have most satisfactorily performed the duties for which armies are raised were those of Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon, Moltke, and Oyama. Each of these was the most perfect military instrument of its day, and their exploits have never been surpassed. Yet neither the Swedes, the French, the Germans, nor the Japanese were addicted to Athletics or Sport.
It was doing for the forty or fifty Bell Companies what Von Moltke did for the German army prior to the Franco-Prussian War. It was the creation of a central company that should link all local companies together, and itself own and operate the means by which these companies are united.
It could, no doubt, have made a landing on British soil, but Napoleon, possibly the greatest military genius the world has ever seen, anticipated Field-Marshal von Moltke, who said that he had found eight ways of getting into England, but he had not found one of getting out again, unless it were possible to pump the North Sea dry, and march the men over.
A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of Von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is 'silent in seven languages; who possesses more and better accumulated information as to the best way of killing people than any one who ever lived. This man plays a restrained and considerate game of chess with his enemy.
He points out how Moltke, as historian and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist, however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis.
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